Hi guys,
Yes that’s right. I have a little gift or offering or whatever you want to call it, to the 3DBuzz community. This post is long, so for those of you who doesn’t want to read sentimental “thank you 3DBuzz” stuff, skip to the details.
I’ve been a member here for some time now, and I am really glad that I got a recommendation from someone to go here and check out the free VTM’s. From the first moment of watching Buzz explain the 3ds max user interface to his students, I knew that this was special, very special. And it has been, of course. Great community (that has rescued me more than once); brilliant VTM’s! Currently, I am working my way through the Maya Fundamentals, and it is really what you Americans always say, awesome! I hope Buzz and Zak will read this post, because I would like to tell them that learning from them has been the best learning experience I have ever had, anywhere! I has been so good and fun that, and I know this looks corny in print but I do mean it, it has brought real joy to me, and I have discovered, through you guys, something that I will definitely keep doing for the rest of my life.
At the moment I am trying to save up the money to buy the Maya Advanced Modelling Course, and I am hoping to be able to get all the Maya courses some day. The Houdini stuff sounds really interesting as well. But I haven’t really been able to support 3DBuzz as much as I have wanted to. No cash for courses, no cash for Member Sponsorship and so on; the usual stuff.
So: about 3 weeks ago I decided that surely there’s got to be something I can do for 3DBuzz, even if I cannot be of much financial support. I thought about it for a moment and decided I could take a few high res. pictures that people can use as textures or for textures at least, and then give them away to the people that use 3DBuzz, and to the Buzz crew, if they’re interested.
So basically what I have done in the last couple of weeks is to walk around a few days here in Berlin and shoot lots of things that I thought would be suitable as texture maps and other things. As often happens, the few pictures turned into quite a lot. I believe there are just over 1000 images in the “collection” that I would like to give to any of you who would like to have them.
So some details:
- All the photos have been taken with a Sony Cybershot camera, 8 megapixel.
- This means that the images are up to 3264 by 2448 pixels large, at 72 dpi (somehow, some of the images that I later rotated to be vertical come out a bit smaller, which kind of pisses me off…).
- As stated above, there is just over 1000 images available for you.
- All is completely free of course, and you can use them for whatever purpose you’d like, including commercial work. It would be nice if you referenced me when using them for textures, but by no means necessary.
- None of the images have been named, but I have sorted them out a little bit, according to subject matter etc.
- For the sake of my own convenience and to save time, I shot the pictures using automatic settings. I have deleted a few images that were not sharp enough, or that I was not happy with, but maybe there are still some images that are not completely up to scratch. If you find any, well, sorry.
- Because I wanted a lossless format all the images are .tiff files. This is why the files are so large, all in all about 11 GByte. The tiff’s have already been compressed with lzw, so when I tried to RAR the whole thing just now, it didn’t really get much smaller. Although this creates a bit of a practical problem, I’m not going to apologize for it. If you want them to be .jpgs, then you go ahead and convert them.
- Most of the pictures were taken on cloudy days, since this makes for less light information like highlights and shadows etc., which would then have to be removed by hand if you’d want to create really good colour textures. As a result, some of the images might seem a little too colourless, or a little dark perhaps. This is not really an issue that should take more than 30 seconds to fix. Mostly you can fix this by doing a little tweaking (in Photoshop) using the Levels, or Curves adjustment.
- I have not taken these pictures according to any convention or anything, but what I sometimes did was to first take a larger picture of the scene, and then to take the texture pictures. This way you’ll get some idea of the scale of those textures in real life. Also, even if there are over 1000 images, there are not 1000 images of totally different things. There will be lots of detailed shots from varying distances in order to have pictures that are usable for a number of various purposes like: close-ups, details you can put into textures you already have, Photoshop grunge brushes, dirt maps and so on. This is why, for example, you’ll find images of how dirt has collected on a wall close to the ground, or why there is a variety of photos of just tarmac etc.
- All the photos have been taken outdoors. I would have wanted to take some inside as well, but that’s just about a hundred times more difficult, mainly because of lighting, but also because you have to get permission and so on. But hey, maybe next time?!
I guess I have been babbling for long enough now. Just one last thing, and it is important. There is a problem, a logistical one. Since this material constitutes 11 GByte I have no idea of how to distribute it. For that I need the help of you guys that are reading this post!
a) I don’t have a website, and I am not getting one just yet, so that option is sort of out.
b) I don’t spend too much time on the internet, and my computer is normally only hooked up to it for as long as I’m actually surfing, so bit torrent file-sharing would be a pain in the butt.
One thing I thought about was that I could perhaps burn a few CD’s and mail them to Buzz, and maybe they could somehow distribute it to you guys? Can some of those of you who are moderators perhaps get in touch with Buzz and his crew (I guess they will read your pm’s a lot sooner than mine) to hear if they are interested in the images?? Perhaps they will make an advanced rendering class one day, and well, here’s 1000 pictures they won’t have to take themselves…
I’m open for other suggestions of course.
Here are a few low-res examples of what you can expect. Hope that at least some of you will be interested and like what you get, eh… when we can figure out a way to distribute it.
Also, I would like to encourage others to share their textures, if you have some that you don’t mind others using.
Cheers,
Dougie
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